You should really give your posts a more descriptive title, you know.

Yes one can run linux from within windows using colinux. It can boot my HD-installed mepis which is quite impressive - and marginally useful. The environment is mostly server-like, text/console only, but it should be possible to run an X desktop (KDE or else) via an xwindows server (eg cygwin). Or even simpler, over vnc but I haven't bothered trying that.

The easier to get started is to download colinux with one of the pre-built images available from their site. There's a woody one, as well as a more recent and slightly bigger debian root-fs image. Once you've got networking bridging configured, and assuming you've got net access from windows, you can then add software via apt-get as usual. IMHO, this is not quite ready for newbies yet, documentation is definitely lacking when not downright confusing. Yet this _is_ exciting and very promising.

Actually if anyone has more experience with this I have questions myself:
- can one install the images on a NTFS partition (I've been using fat32 myself)
- has anyone succeeded in booting a live cdrom from co-linux